Many years ago I knew this guy, who, at the time, was a fairly average high school student. He had a basic “B” average at a very basic public high school. He was not the president of any school clubs, nor was he any kind of athletic star. He did, however, have a unique artistic ability. Not that anyone really cared.
When it came time for him to think about applying to college, everyone around him told him that he was a perfect candidate for the local community college or State University. But for reasons now lost to time, he decided to apply to a fairly fancy and exclusive private liberal arts college. Now you, I, and probably just about everyone else around him probably said the same thing to this kid: there is no way you will be accepted with the grades you have. And in normal circumstances, we would have been right.
But here is what he did: as you know, every college journey begins with a single step of writing a letter to the admissions office asking for the application forms. But instead of typing a plain and simple letter asking for said forms, he created a brilliant, full-color, three page opus. He did these marvelously cute yet simple little drawings, which represented himself writing the letter to the college. He drew pictures of himself running track, singing in the choir, and all the many little tasks that he had done working as a stagehand and such on school productions. At the very end, he had a picture of himself looking like the big man on campus saying, “As you can see, I think I’m a pretty hot prospect. Please send me the necessary application forms.” And the very last panel was the same little man with a sad face and his pockets pulled up and turned inside-out, and the text read “Also, please send the financial aid application forms.”
Granted, he was an average student, but the way he approached the admissions office was anything but.
I was not there, but I enjoy imagining a drab little office in that college, with some poor temp-worker S.O.B., whose sorry lot in life that month was to sit there and open the hundreds and hundreds of bland letters from kids wanting the application form sent to them, and worse, having to transcribe every single name and address onto an address label over and over and over again. But then, one day, this bored out of their mind office worker opened up this magnificent, full-color, illustrated letter asking for application forms in a totally new and fabulous way.
Well of course, every single person in every office on the floor had to have been called over to look at this astonishing work of art. It made a major impression, as the package of forms this kid received back included a personal letter from the director of admissions, telling them how much he enjoyed what he sent them. And he was of course accepted, to the surprise of everyone, including himself.
Now that is a great story in and of itself about originality at work, but if you’ll indulge me a little further, I would like to add a little bit of commentary.
Everywhere you look in this great land of ours, you see large organizations and institutions. Of course most of us benefit from these large organizations and institutions, but there is a price to be paid for living in a highly specialized, automated and/or hierarchical culture, and that is, for most people, the day is very repetitious. Even the greatest brain surgeon has to occasionally say to himself, “oh brother, not this tumor again.”
It is easy to assume that because people consume an awful lot of the same thing day after day, this must be because they like consuming the same thing day after day. But the thing is, the reason they do the same thing over and over again is largely because this is all that is available to them, or achieving necessary economy of scale requires it. And so all too often, when people want to do something “original,” they tend to think that they should just write yet another romance novel, because that’s what the majority of people are buying. True, there are some products for which there is a huge market. And of course there is a lot to be said for just gaining a little market share of an established market. But with so many people crowded around those already saturated opportunities, does it really make sense to chase that goal?
There is precious little encouragement out there regarding the marketability of your unique self. Uniqueness does not jive with mass production, so you have probably had your own uniqueness ignored to death from the get go, as your parents and schools and everyone else all advised you to shoehorn yourself into an existing market.
But most people love to find something unique, because, like that poor office worker opening those envelopes, they are bored to death with the mass-produced bland stuff that comes at them so repetitiously day after day after day.
If you produce something that is merely a slightly more polished version of what has already been done a thousand times before, that might gain you some little piece of market share. And you certainly won’t risk anyone laughing at you for being different. But as this illustrated letter I previously mentioned illustrates, because there is SO MUCH conformity everywhere, that also means there is that much more opportunity to draw huge attention to yourself, because it is so seldom that anyone offers something different than what is already offered in the mass markets.
Note, a visitor’s comment below informs me that paper applications are now a thing of the past. But despite its obsolescence, I still think this is a good example . . . there are still endless ways to “de-conform” . . . but how many kids take advantage of it? True, if a college is looking for your ability to conform, you’d best do it . . . altho i can’t understand why you’d want to attend a school like that 🙂 but as this story shows, the more competition there is, the more likely “being odd” will get you noticed.
© Justin Locke
2 Responses to A unique approach to applying to college